Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019 round 1/Wikimedia Österreich/Proposal form
Overview[edit]
- 1. In order to support community review, please provide a brief description of your organization's work in the upcoming funding period.
Wikimedia Österreich's annual plan comprises the following three strategic areas: community support, free content, and reach / free knowledge awareness. Centerpiece of WMAT's self-conception and strategy is to sustain motivated and active Wikimedia communities as a reliable service provider. Since we serve a highly networked international (online) community, we consider ourselves a hub in this network - we connect people, ideas, and often also resources across communities and borders. Hence, we also focus on building strong partnerships inside and outside of the movement and engage in activities which co-create sustainable framework conditions (particularly regarding volunteer support and organizational effectiveness) for the wider movement in general and the DACH (Austria, Germany and Switzerland) and CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) communities in particular. In the past two years, we successfully engaged in diversity projects in Austria and the international movement, and fostered good practices for diversity and inclusion in our own organisation and at Wikimedia events. Furthermore, we started expanding our volunteer base, within the wider free knowledge movement in Austria in general and towards particularly towards tech and data science in particular, and will continue to do and refine all this in the upcoming funding period. We also believe that serving our communities must be accompanied by advocacy and public policy work in order to increase impact in all these areas in the long run.
- 2. Name, fiscal year, and funding period.
- Legal name of organization: Wikimedia Österreich
- Organization's fiscal year: 01/01-12/31
- 12-month funding period requested: 1/1/2019-31/12/2019
- Currency requested: EUR
- Name of primary contact: Claudia Garád
- 3. Amount requested.
Table 1
| Currency requested | US$ | |
| Total expenses for the upcoming year | 297,500 | 331,608 |
| APG funding requested for the upcoming year | 265,000 | 299,426 |
| Amount of funding received from WMF for the current year | 265,000 | 295,382 |
- 4. How does your organization know what community members and contributors to online projects need or want? Does your organization conduct needs assessments or consult the contributors and volunteers most involved with its work?
- WMAT is constantly looking into ways to improve its community services. In order to gain an understanding of what our contributors want and need, we apply various methods:
- Face-to-face interaction: WMAT activities and services are discussed between board, staff and community in the context of several regular events. Some of them are focused on needs assessment (e.g. the IdeaLabs), while others mainly serve other purposes but also provide a platform for these discussions (general assembly once a year, WikiTuesdays every week, cracker-barrel meetings a few times a year in different parts of Austria). In addition, our office / staff offers one-to-one consultation for community members who plan projects and activities. The latter is also our usual way to conduct a needs assessment of new ideas and projects. Our annual plan and budget are published for discussion online and we organize a PlanningLab to foster discourse.
- Online discussions: We ask for opinions on specific issues online on our members wiki and mailing list. However, our experience shows that this usually creates less feedback than in-person discussions. Furthermore, we monitor talk pages and discussions on Wikimedia projects which are related to our chapter's activities.
- Survey: As last year, we also conducted a community survey which aimed at understanding the needs of our community and to get a measurable overview of their satisfaction with the general direction of our work and our specific services. Providing a possibility for anonymous feedback is also a good supplement of our other channels for community consultation.
- 5. Please provide a link to your organization's strategic plan, and a link to your separate annual plans for the current and upcoming funding periods if you have them.
- Mission statement (in English)
- Strategy 2017+ (in English)
- Annual plan 2018 (in German)
- Annual plan 2019 (in German)
Annual plan summary[edit]
Wikimedia Österreich will mostly continue their current two-year-plan and extend it to a third year with a few changes - outlined below - which reflect new developments in the past two years.
- On a programmatic level
- A stronger focus on newcomer recruiting and retention
- Community building around Wikidata as a result and follow-up of hosting the Wikimedia Hackathon in 2017
- Diversity has been a focus of our work in the past two years and this also concerns to a huge part newcomer activities, e.g. by targeting underrepresented groups.
- Collaborating with other established volunteer organisations, to foster Wikimedia work as part of their online volunteering portfolio.
- A stronger focus on newcomer recruiting and retention
- Increased commitment to the wider international movement
- Given the relative size of WMAT we have always overproportionally supported international collaboration and further increased these efforts in the past two years. We see it as our contribution towards more equity in the movement, in alignment with the new strategic direction.
- We contribute two of our experts to two working groups of the movement strategy process.
- We serve as fiscal sponors for two major international projects and put time and effort into improving the process of fiscal sponsorship for the future for all stakeholders involved.
- We provide low key access to information material, swag and other resources for volunteer work for communities without affiliates or budgets, especially within the CEE region.
- Increased commitment to the wider international movement
- Supporting free knowledge in Austria beyond Wikimedia projects
- Fostering the wider open culture movement on a local level, has always been part of our portfolio (see projects such as the Open Data Portal for Austria). In the context of the new strategic direction, we want to do what we can to make Wikimedia part of the central infrastructure of free knowledge in our region.
- WMAT plans to widen its scope in this regard by supporting other independent wikis and open knowledge platforms in Austria (in 2018 WMAT became the host of the RegioWiki, a regional platform featuring free knowledge that would not be notable enough for the German-language Wikipedia).
- Supporting free knowledge in Austria beyond Wikimedia projects
- Goals and metrics
- Metrics for all programs
- The Participants metric is much higher than we planned two years ago, mainly because it is hard to plan the exact number and nature of events one or two years in advance, especially volunteers driven events (such as fairs etc.) need a certain flexibility and are subject to their rather short term availabilities. For 2019 we tried to find a more realistic number based on the past two years.
- The Content Pages are also above target, which is mainly due to the nature of the metric, which includes very different things from articles to Wikidata items, which makes it hard to plan.
- Our Quality metrics on the other hand are lower than expected, due to events and conflicts within our communities, which we reported on regularly in the past two years. We want to point out however, that quality is still an important factor in our volunteer work, and that the numbers are still fairly good in international comparison. We corrected the goals for the coming year accordingly.
- For the Diversity metric we had no baseline two years ago, hence the high numbers. The projected results for 2019 were adjusted accordingly.
- Metrics per program
- Community Program
- We had no baseline for the Community Leadership metric, which is above target. Adjustments were made for 2019.
- The Retention metric is still challenging, as it is hard to capture the diversity of ways volunteers can stay engaged and our chosen timeframes for measuring were definitely too short. As a result we decided to change the way we measure retention starting from 2019, mainly by expanding the timeframe. Many aspects of successful newcomer work will still not be captured in numbers, but need some context/storytelling in our reporting.
- Free Content
- The Useful Content metric is below target for similar reasons as the Quality metric mentioned above: a general lower level of activity within the photography community due to internal conflicts over licence issues.
- We introduce a new metric to reflect our widened scope around free knowledge in Austria (see section about RegioWiki in the programmatic section above): Free Content Beyond Wikimedia Projects
- Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness
- The metric for Sustainable Outreach is plateauing, which is not unusual over a certain amount of time, the metric was slightly modified accordingly.
- Committed Supporters: Local fundraising remains a major challenge in Austria, our plan to gain more supporting members did not work out, due to lack of incentives such as tax deductability (in contrast to Germany or Switzerland). We stopped the campaign and and dismiss the metric in future.
- Community Program
- Metrics for all programs
- Budget
- Please find our budget here. As our budget roughly remains the same for three years in a row now, there is not much change in spending patterns, apart from us doing more (especially regarding cooperations and newcomers) with the same resources. We also support more and more international activities with our budget (strategy process, fiscal sponsorships, mini grants for smaller communities without resources etc.).
- Staff costs
- Unfortunately, the Austrian third party grant for a full time administrative assistant was terminated before the projected ending of the program in 2019, as a result of Austria's new government's change of politics. From todays perspective, this decreases our overall prospect of third party funding for the coming year. We keep looking for funding opportunities, but do not have major funds lined-up yet. It is also challenging in terms of keeping up our level of activities and international commitments, so we decided to at least add a mini job (8 hours per week) to our staff resources which we hope to cover at least in parts with overhead budgets from the fiscal sponsorships.
- At first sight the ratio of staff costs to the overall budget might raise questions. However, it is important to consider that we not only handle and administer WMAT's budget with this resources, but some additional 40,000 EUR for fiscal sponsorships which add 14% to our budget. In addition, based on numbers of previous years, only 21% of staff costs are for administration/overhead, the rest supports programmatic work and is considered very good ratio for NPOs in Austria.
[edit]
|
Participants | Newly registered |
Content pages |
Quality | Diversity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New goals 2019 WMAT (1 year plan) | 3.100 | 225 | 69.500 | 800 | 360 |
| New goals 2019 WMAT + WLM International & CEE Spring (1 year plan) | 12.500 | 7275 | 328.000 | 3.500 | 400 |
| Current goals 2017–2018 (2 year plan) | 3.500 | 600 | 160.000 | 10.000 | 1.000 |
Participants[edit]
|
Definition: The number of people who attend our events, programs or activities, either in person or virtually. This definition does not include people organizing activities, social media followers, donors, or others not participating directly. |
Newly registered[edit]
|
Definition: The number of participating people with new accounts on Wikimedia projects (up until two weeks before an event). |
Content pages[edit]
|
Definition: A content page is an article on Wikipedia, an item on Wikidata, a content page on Wikisource, an entry on Wiktionary, and a media file on Commons, etc. This metric captures the total number of content pages created or improved across all Wikimedia projects. |
Quality[edit]
|
Definition: Community decorated Commons files (featured pictures, quality images, valued images) supported by Wikimedia Österreich. |
Diversity[edit]
|
Definition: The number of unique participants and/or organizers of activities conducted or supported by Wikimedia Österreich who belong to underrepresented groups in the Wikimedia movement in Austria. These groups are defined as women, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, persons belonging to ethnic, language or religious minorities in Austria, foreigners and people with disabilities. |
Metrics program Community Support[edit]
| Community leadership | Community motivation (in %) | Community retention (new) |
| Definition: There are 750 volunteer organizers of activities supported by us. | Definition: At least 80% of the participants of community surveys agree that our activities contribute to motivating them for their online work. | Definition: 80 new editors still active 12 weeks after registration (new metric only valid for 2019). |
Metrics program Free Content[edit]
| Useful content | Versatile content | Free content beyond Wikimedia projects(new) |
| Definition: 14,000 additional distinct media files supported by Wikimedia Österreich used in the main namespace of Wikimedia projects.. | Definition: Retaining the average usage of the distinct media files mentioned above on at least 2 main namespace pages. | Definition: Freely licensed content pages in Non-Wikimedia projects (e.g. RegioWiki). |
Metrics Program Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness[edit]
| Sustainable outreach network (newsletter, social media) |
In-kind donations (in €) |
| Definition: Individuals reached with permanent online channels (newsletter and social media, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube). | Definition: In-kind donations from partner organizations. |
Verification and signature[edit]
Please enter "yes" or "no" for the verification below.
- The term “political or legislative activities” includes any activities relating to political campaigns or candidates (including the contribution of funds and the publication of position statements relating to political campaigns or candidates); voter registration activities; meetings with or submissions and petitions to government executives, ministers, officers or agencies on political or policy issues; and any other activities seeking government intervention or policy implementation (like “lobbying”), whether directed toward the government or the community or public at large. General operating support through the FDC may not be used to cover political and legislative activities, although you may make a separate grant agreement with the WMF for these purposes.
I verify that no funds from the Wikimedia Foundation will be used
for political or legislative activities except as permitted by a grant agreementYes.
Please sign below to complete this proposal form.
- IMPORTANT. Please do not make any changes to this proposal form after the proposal submission deadline for this round. If a change that is essential to an understanding of your organization's proposal is needed, please request the change on the discussion page of this form so it may be reviewed by FDC staff. Once submitted, complete and valid proposal forms submitted on time by eligible organizations will be considered unless an organization withdraws its application in writing or fails to remain eligible for the duration of the FDC process.
Please sign here once this proposal form is complete, using four tildes. --CDG (WMAT staff) (talk) 14:24, 7 December 2018 (UTC)